In which Michael possibly reveals himself to be a travel snob

A couple of days after the riots broke out in London over the weekend, Prime Minister David Cameron rushed back from his holiday in Tuscany to deal with the situation, or something.

Seirously, what is it with West London British luvvydom (something Cameron can't help but seem to want to belong to) and Tuscany and Provence. Yes, beautiful places. Yes, good food. Yes, good wine. Lots of interesting ruins and old buildings. Worth visiting once or twice. But, frankly, dull. Do they all go there together in summer every year?

Couldn't they just, sometimes, go somewhere a little more interesting. I am not expecting our ruling class to holiday in Gagauzia, but perhaps once in a while they could go as far as the other side of the Adriatic? Croatia is nice. Equally good food, although perhaps slightly iffier wine. Possibly even more beautiful scenery. Equally wonderful ruins. Not even dramatically less Italian. Cheaper. (Okay, Peter Mandelson has been hanging out with dubious Russians in Montenegro, but I am not sure if he counts).

I am perhaps going off at a tangent, but David Cameron in Tuscany has started me thinking of the movie Love Actually, written and directed by super-Luvvie Richard Curtis, back in the days before we started comparing him un-ironically to the Khmer Rouge.

In this film, a writer played by Colin Firth takes what is all considered a remarkably long time to fall in love with his Portuguese housekeeper Aurélia, played by Lúcia Moniz. After she has returned to her family, he realises that he loves her and so rushes after her to declare himself. We see him arriving at Marseille airport and rushing to the restaurant run by her family, where he manages to successfully propose to her in broken Portuguese.

With all respect though, huh? Marseille airport? He pursues a Portuguese woman back to her family in Provence? Okay, there probably are Portuguese families running restaurants in France, but Provence? Why not chase her back to Lisbon? Or Porto? Beautiful, cinematic cities both of them, either of which would look really nice in a couple of establishing shots. (In fact, I first visited Lisbon after seeing it so beautifully shot in Fred Schepisi's movie of John Le Carre's novel The Russia House in order to see if it was actually that beautiful a city). Or perhaps she went to Lagos to cook bacon and eggs for English package tourists? Or she went to Pinhão to tread grapes with her bare feet? Or at least something and somewhere that might indicate that Richard Curtis realises that Portuguese people come from Portugal, and that the world outside London and the Home Counties does consist of slightly more than just Provence and Tuscany?

(In retrospect, I now think that the movie would have have been improved by Lúcia Moniz pulling out a button, pronouncing that she was putting nenhuma pressão on Colin Firth over the pegada de carbon of his flight to Provence and then causing him to explode into pink mulsh, but I suppose that was too much to hope for).

At this point I am getting a further sense of missing John Major. He at least knew where Portugal is.

Silliness

Pilllip II of Macedon National Stadium, Skopje, Macedonia.

The aforementioned Phillip was the first of only two national managers who led successful European campaigns.

(Skopje is in a bowl in the mountains and is a smoggy city. Getting clear photographs is sometimes difficult).

Etiquette for the modern world

I was having lunch in a nice London restaurant with a female, foreign friend of mine. She wanted to tweet, SMS, update her various friends and social networks to tell them where she was. However, she was doing this using highly expensive roaming on her Swedish smartphone.

On the other side of the table, I was using my local, inexpensive data allowance on my smartphone. Seeing what she was doing, I quickly turned on the portable WiFi hotspot on my own smartphone, so that she could share my local data allowance and did not suffer the expensive data roaming charges that she was incurring.

Was I honour-bound as a gentleman to do this? Or should I instead spend my time mounting a campaign against the horrific roaming charges imposed by phone companies?

Update: As a further issue to ponder with respect to this trivial and largely absurd question, what should one do when one party, er, leaves the table for a few minutes? Portable WiFi hotspots have very short range, so if a gentleman leaves the table (particularly if his destination is in the basement) should he in fact leave his smartphone on the table so that the lady can continue to use his WiFi, but in doing so also slightly increase the risk that the phone will be stolen by the urchins of the East End? The fact that such a moment is likely to be the occasion when she is most likely to want to use it is pertinent, surely.

Patterns persist.

If you map Mobile phone conversations of today, you get The Nine Nations of North American as envisaged by Joel Garreau in 1981.

Smart guy, Garreau. His other book Edge City probably helped me understand the modern built world more than any other book I have ever read.

Chinese telephone companies.

I left a comment over that The Register that got a little out of control. If anyone wants to hire a telco analyst, I am available.

In the mid 1990s, there were two 2G GSM mobile networks set up in China, one by the incumbent operator China Telecom, and one by a new company China Unicom. (We say "new company", but all these things were and generally still are state owned).
In 1999, the mobile assets of China Telecom were split off to found China Mobile. The advantages of being part of the incumbent fixed line operator up to that point were such that China Mobile was by far the market leader by then, a position it retains to this day. (China Mobile is by far the biggest mobile operator in the world). At the same time, more assets of China Telecom were spun off as China Netcom to build high speed internet infrastructure in China - i.e. to be a large ISP.
On order to supposedly compete with fixed line services, China Unicom was also given a Wireless Local Loop (WLL) licence. For this, it used the IS-95 CDMA technology developed by Qualcomm in the US, which was being sold as a WLL solution at that time as well as being a fully featured cellular system (as used by Verizon and Sprint in the US). China Unicom were highly aware of this, and thus used the WLL licence to build a second mobile network.

Meanwhile, the Chinese had decided that they did not want to pay huge levels of royalties to western companies to operate 3G mobile phone services, and decided that they would develop an "indigenous" 3G standard called TS-SCDMA to be used in China. (In actual fact, this was originally developed by Siemens to be possibly used as the European 3G standard, but this lost out to W-CDMA). While this was being further developed and made ready for use in China, no 3G licences were issued for use in China.
Thus, approaching the 2008 Olympics, there were no 3G services in China, and the Chinese were concerned that China Mobile was too dominant, and they were concerned that their "indigenous" 3G solution had not been launched yet, and they were embarrassed by the prospect of foreigners coming to the games and discovering that there was no 3G service, and they retrospectively decided that what was better was to have a number of telcos competing on both wireless and fixed line services rather than separating by function.

Thus the industry was reorganised:

China Mobile was awarded a TD-SCDMA licence, and ordered to roll it out at once.

China Unicom was given a W-CDMA licence compatible with the rest of the world, and was forced to buy China Netcom so as to offer fixed line and wired ISP services. China Unicom was forced to sell its IS-95/CDMA network to China Telecom.

China Telecom was instructed to buy China Unicom's said IS-95/CDMA network, and upgrade it to 3G speeds. (China Unicom had already done this to some extent).

Thus we have three mobile networks, the biggest of which has 2G GSM and a strange, 3G network using a standard used nowhere else that few people use and which doesn't work very well, but which has most of the customers. (There is no number portability in China, so customers don't often switch network). The second largest, China Unicom, has the combination of GSM and UMTS/W-CDMA that most iPhones are designed for, and that is why they have been the only network offering the iPhone until now. (Apparently several million people use unlocked iPhones on China Mobile's 2G GSM network in EDGE mode only).
And you have a third mobile network, which uses CDMA/IS-95 as used by Verizon in the US. Apple's introduction of a phone for Verizon earlier this year didn't quite solve the problem, though, as the use of a SIM is optional on CDMA, and China Mobile uses a SIM and Verizon doesn't, and the CDMA iPhone 4 does not accept one. Hence we have had to wait a little while for that problem to be ironed out. My assumption is that the new iPhone(s) that we will see later this year will solve that problem.
China Mobile is going to use 3GPP LTE for 4G phones, as apparently are everyone else in China. At that point all three carriers in China will probably carry the iPhone, but we won't see that until late next year at the earliest.

Etymological puzzles.

When staying in hotels in Asia, it is quite common to find that the hotel will offer a "baby sister service". This is exactly the same as a baby sitter, of course, and the expression makes sense because in places where people have large extended families, it is a task that is often by performed by a sister. "Baby sitter" doesn't appear to make much sense if you are a non-native English speaker, so the phrase has been transformed into another similar sounding phrase that we would see as incorrect, but which makes more sense in the context.

Similarly, perhaps, in Malaysia and Indonesia one will often stay in an institution called a "rest house". This is a place of accommodation that lacks the full facilities of a hotel, basically. The name makes perfect logical sense - this is after all a house in which you rest. I do wonder, though, whether the word actually comes from people with limited English mishearing the word "guesthouse", and thus converting it into something slightly different.

Photo composition moments

I was looking for a nice contrast of things, and I thought that the bullring in the foreground, an in some ways fairly typical spanish city in the middle, and a long line of cranes indicating that this is indeed one of Europe's most important ports in the background was nice.

Algeciras, like Felixstowe, is one of those ports that is not historically very important but is a very major point now due to its strategic location. The really large ships on the route through the Mediterranean and Suez Canal to Asia are not going to divert to Valencia or Barcelona, so they stop at the very bottom of Spain. Containers can then be transferred to smaller ships to head north or elsewhere, or onto trucks or trains to be taken to other points in Spain. (When container shipping arrived in UK, another reason why much of the shipping moved from London to Felixstowe was that the Port of London was very heavily unionised and Felixtowe wasn't. I am not sure if a similar factor came into play in Spain, given that the alternative of Cadiz is also famous for its labour disputes and militant union men. in any event, Algeciras is now the key port.

With respect to the photo, having taken it I then realised that I also had the Rock of Gibraltar behind the port, and it is always delightful to get more in the photo that you intended.

Of course, "hub" seaports (in which containers are unloaded from one ship to another, or possibly other modes of transport) are like hub airports. Location is important in the sense that they need to be very conveniently on the route from A to B, but local markets are possibly less important than the strategic location and efficiency of a port. The busiest container port in the world is in Singapore, which is a significant but not very large market in a perfect location at the end of the Straits of Malacca. (The two Chinese ports of Hong Kong and Shenzhen - essentially two parts of the same urban area with a border down the middle - are each individually close to Singapore in terms of size, however. Combined they are massively busier).

Algeciras on the Straits of Gibraltar is a perfect place for such a port, but so is Tangier in Morocco. (The Indonesian island of Batam is as good a place as Singapore, too, but building a major port in Indonesia is just too hard). And as it happens, there is an enormous project to build a gigantic port in Africa, directly opposite Algeciras, the so called Tanger-Med, port, actually about 40km east of Tangier. I visited it the day before I visited Algeciras.

Well, when I say visited, I mean "went past it in a bus", actually, so my photographs are perhaps a little lacking because of this. However:


It's actually a lot bigger than that - I was only able to get a certain amount into the photo. In fact, when complete, it will be much bigger than the port at Alegiras on the Spanish side.


There is a lot more under construction, too. Plus there is an extensive motorway system heading south. When the port is complete, it will be the largest and hopefully busiest in Africa. To some extent it is to compete with Algeciras - in terms of transferring containers from one ship to another, Tanger-Med will be more modern and will have lower cost and (hopefully) more flexible labour. As well as that, the port is about trade between Africa and Spain, Europe, and further afield, and this is all good too.


Spanish registered truck, there.

One hopes that this is actually a sensible project, and that it will aid African development and international trade in a significant way. This of course requires efficient management, relatively free markets, the rule or law, and reasonably low levels of corruption. The port is apparently being built with government money, and run by "a private company with public sector privileges". That sounds like an invitation for trouble, but is probably no worse than the arrangements by which many ports are run. One does also wonder from who the Moroccan government has borrowed the money. There is a reservoir of cheap capital that is used to fund Arab infrastructure (and other) projects that is ultimately based on the huge oil wealth of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi. Like all mispriced capital, such money can be useful if you are trying to borrow money to finance and build a sensible business, but the mispricing also tends to encourage bubbles, rentseeking, excess, and an ultimate collapse under a mountain of debt. Given the strategic location of Tanger-Med, a sizeable port is sensible, but one hopes that massive overbuilding has not occurred. The story of EU aid for infrastructure projects in Spain and Portugal was starting off with sensible projects, and ending up with absurdity, and one hopes that this is not similar.

Impressing the Swiss

Last week, I spent some time waiting for a bus at this road intersection in Croatia. The direct bus from Bihać in Bosnia goes to Zagreb, but as I was going to Zadar, I had to get off at the intersection and wait for the bus to Zadar.

As I was waiting, I found a mobile phone in the gravel beside the road. It was switched on. The menus were in German, and the phone (and SIM) were branded with the Orange network. I threw it in my bag, and thought little more of it for the moment.

However, when I got back to London, I realised that I still had it. I couldn't switch it on again, because the SIM in the card was PIN protected. However, when I put my own SIM in the phone, it worked fine. The phone was not network locked. After a little navigation through the menus, I managed to switch the phone to English language mode. There were a few SMS messages stored in the phone (in German, and apparently describing a trip to Bosnia) and of course there were phone numbers stored in the address book. However, these were all in national format, without a country code. Numbers that were clearly people's mobiles were of the form 07xxxxxxxx. A number entitled "pizza" was of the form 08xxxxxxxx. A business number, presumably.

Now, whose phone was it? Orange do not have a network in Croatia or Bosnia, and the phone was set to German. So the phone belonged to another foreign visitor. Orange do not have a network in Germany either, but they do have a network in Austria. Many, many Austrians visit Croatia - they used to rule it - so my first guess was that the phone belonged to an Austrian. However, a quick check of the Austrian telephone numbering system indicated that Austrian mobile numbers have the form 06xx, and 07xx and 08xx are all kinds of extraneous services rather than regular numbers. So, German speaking but not Austrian or German. Who then?

Further checks indicate that Orange does own a network in Switzerland, 07xx does denote mobile numbers in Switzerland, and 08xx is used for free and shared cost services often used by businesses. So, Swiss.

At this point I am on a roll, and national stereotypes come into it. I would expect a Swiss person to try to return my phone to me, so I am going to make an extra effort in return. (I might not do this for certain other nationalities. On the other hand, strangers have on occasion gone to some trouble to return lost phones to me, so in any event one wants to return the favour, as it were). There is also a sense that if I do get in contact with a Swiss person, that the contact will then be uncomplicated and hassle free, due to their being Swiss. I don't have the name or number of the owner of the phone, so I look through the names in the address book. One of them is listed as "Mama", which sounds promising. Mama's date of birth is listed in the phone as some time in 1970, so Mama presumably is okay with being sent text messages. (She also has children old enough to lose phones while travelling in the Balkans, despite being younger than me. Perhaps I need to get a move on with certain aspects of my life. But I digress).

I look up the country code for Switzerland, which is 41. I change the (national) number for Mama into an international number, and send two text messages (in English) to the number, stating that I found a phone belonging to one of her children in Croatia, and that if provided with an address, I will return the phone.

The next morning I receive a phone call from Switzerland. A young man speaking excellent but (slightly) accented English tells me that I have his girlfriend's phone, and is slightly amused when he discovers it is in London. ("Ah. 44 is England"). He gives me an address in the Swiss town of Chur, capital of the canton of Graubünden, near the Austrian border and just south of Liechtenstein. I haven't been to Chur, but I have been quite close nearby. Interestingly enough, Graubünden is the only canton of Switzerland where the Romansh language is spoken. I doubt Samsung make phones with Romansh menu options (although Linux probably has Romansh options). However, as the town's name was spelled "Khur" by the man on the phone, and that is the Swiss German spelling, I guess the phone did in fact belong to a German speaker.

I actually verified the address with Google Maps before sending the phone, and as Google gave the name of the town as "Chur" (the standard German spelling), that is what I used. I suspect it will get there.

Unfortunately, I missed something, of no relevance to the problem of returning the phone, but still irritating. The Swiss telephone numbering system mixes geographic and non-geographic numbers in an ugly way, and as it happens 08x, is used for freephones, shared cost numbers, and the town of Chur, for which the code is 081. As it happened, the pizza shop actually had a local number, so I should have been able to figure out that the phone came from Chur. However, I wasn't looking carefully enough, all I really wanted to know was the country, and I was not expecting the number system to be that inelegant.

Attentive readers will also probably suggest that it would have been simpler to simply read the SIM number off the SIM, obtain the mobile country code from the SIM number, and find out that it was Swiss that way. This is true, but the SIM number is in tiny writing, and my eyesight is not as good as it used to be.

A general frustration

When I posted this piece on Samizdata about getting held up in airport security and missing a flight yesterday, my thought was that I was perhaps being a little self-indulgent and I would be taken to task by someone in the comments for this.

Nothing like that though. Just sympathy, and many, many more insults for airport security policies.

Feel the me

Sadly, I am definitely one of these.

Me in Turkey last week: 15 inch laptop, iPad, Kindle, Android phone, dumb phone, digital SLR, two additional lenses, external card reader and spare memory cards, one headset.

Constitutions

My kind of engineering

Vientiane, Laos. October 2010

Cricket posting

English person: "Yeaaahhhhh. It's amazing. Our cricket team has thrashed yours. I bet you are really appalled and upset this morning. Your team is crapppp!!!!!

Australian person: Yes. I've known this for months if not years. While we would love to win the Ashes back, I am not dramatically more upset than I was yesterday. The decline of my cricket team is a more a long running, endless agony of the soul than anything sudden.

English person: Surely this must come as a surprise to you. It does to me.

Australian person: No. Also, Ricky Ponting is an idiot who should have been sacked in 2005. I've known this since 2005. Really astute people have known it longer. Now please go away.

The UEA is an even scarier place than I thought

Dubai. January 2010

Abu Dhabi, October 2010

Really, should American fast food chains even be allowed to operate in places like this?

KEEP PLANET GREEN

My inkjet printer had run out of ink. A seller on ebay offered me "compatible" cartridges for about half what Canon were charging, so I ordered a set. They took a couple of days to arrive, the seller gave me positive feedback on ebay before I received them, and my printer is working perfectly with the new ink cartridges. All good.

However, as well as the full cartridges, the seller sent me a return envelope with a prepaid postage label with an address in Coventry, and the words "KEEP PLANET GREEN. Recycle empty cartridges" on it. It was pretty obvious what was going on. The seller wanted me to send him my empty cartridges so that he could fill them with ink and then sell them to somebody else.

This is fine, of course. In fact, this is good. If someone is making a living doing this, well done and good luck to him. (The absence of an article between "KEEP" and "PLANET" makes me think he is Slavic, and probably Polish. Once again, good). Interesting, though, that he thinks that the best way to encourage his customers to send him their empty cartridges is through Green guilt-trippery. He might be right. Personally I would prefer he simply stated "Please give me your empty cartridges so that I can refill them and sell them to somebody else" or (best of all) "Please return your empty cartridges and I will give you £1 off your next order".

That said, I put my empty cartridges in the envelope and popped them in a postbox. He gave me good customer service and is most welcome to them.

Update: If anyone has been wondering, this is the Kurilpa Bridge in Brisbane, Australia. I suffered laptop death recently, and somehow as a consequence, the spiel which was intended to go with this picture never got posted.

Is it just me, or is this a weirdly modest claim?

Ways of looking at things

I had a bad accident last year. I was wearing shoes with soles with poor traction. I slipped when going down some stairs. I put a hand out to stop the fall and did this. I had pretty much everything on that list except for re-fracture, compression neuropathy and tendon rupture. I was in a lot of pain for about nine months, but this is now mostly gone. I have regained the ability to do everything I normally do on a day to day basis (touch type, for instance), but I have some problems doing anything that involves strength in my left hand.

In any event, I was having lunch with a friend yesterday. I explained the above.

"Can't you get it fixed?"
"Not at the moment, no".
"What do you mean?"
"Not at the present level of technology".

He looked at me for a moment, and the I guess he acknowledged that this was reasonable. It is absolutely the right way of looking at things though. In things such as artificial body parts (an artificial joint and perhaps artificial tendons to go with it) and surgical techniques, the rate of advance is sufficiently fast that one must consider it with respect to your own health.

Some additions

In February, the great thing of Singapore still had cranes on it.





It is much taller than it appears from these photographs, by the way. I am a long way away from it in all three cases.

God bless globalisation

I am an Australian who is regularly resident in London. I am sitting in an Irish pub in Bucharest, drinking Danish branded beer (probably brewed locally) and watching a rugby match between Tonga and Fiji on the television.

Seriously, we need to get Romania into the six (seven) nations as soon as possible.